Saturday, November 24, 2012

Yes Cecil, A Long Story Short, Part Thirteen

1

“In the beginning, there was dust,”
Duncan intoned, reading the first line of A Trifling Monograph on
the Subject of Library Dust, an
attractive little book that had been collecting that very subject on
his shelves. He brought it over to his desk and hesitated before the
two stacks of books on either side of his computer, the two Martello
towers that represented his quandary over what to read and what to
sell. He placed it on the left tower, on top of a dusty copy of The
Lone Rider of Santa Fe, the
tower of books to be read. He picked up his cup of tea and walked
over to the window.

A foggy Monday
morning. It was still foggy. Perhaps Uncle Edward was looking out his
windows at a nether sky beneath him, clouds of fog truncating
skyscrapers, fingers of fog writing indecipherable messages on brick
and glass, blankets of fog hiding wet dark streets leaving the bare
grasping upper branches of the tallest trees to form a landscape like a
haunted grave yard. In his 53 years he couldn't remember so many
foggy days.Was it climate change he wondered. He had hardly been able
to see his finger tips at arms length when he had crossed St. Antoine
street twenty minutes ago, and, being startled by a bicycle bell—that
classic old-fashioned bell he remembered having on his tricycle as a
child—he had, for a fraction of a moment, hesitated, not knowing
whether to move back or forward. 'He who hesitates is lost', he heard
his father say, one adage of many his late father had often dryly
pronounced. If it hadn't been for the bicycle bell he might have been
dust himself. What had the bicyclist been thinking? His elbow had
clipped Duncan and spun him round, and he had heard a muffled curse
as he caught sight of the phantom bicycle, enveloped in its own wake
turbulence, disappear into the brumous atmosphere. Rubbing his arm,
he had continued on his way only to discover, after a few minutes,
that he had been walking in the wrong direction. It would be odd, he
had thought, if the fog lifted to disclose a completely different
reality, an alternative world. One of the future or one of the past,
Blade Runner or Bleak House.

It had
been fortunate he decided against bringing Hugh to work that day. On
Mondays, Duncan liked to arrive early with Hugh at Strand
Cordage Ltd. in order to grasp
the week by the lapels like Sam Spade dealing with an unruly crook.
The time between 7 and 9 were the hours he felt he had a modicum of
control over the business week. It was like the calm moments before
getting on a roller coaster, the ups, downs and curves inevitably
awaiting. He felt there were to be many curves on the horizon.

He
sipped his tea and looked out at the vapourous miasma on the other side of his windows, and pondered over what he was going to do with the two businesses he was
juggling. Having inherited Strand Cordage
after his Father died in 1991, he had decided to move most of the
10,000 books of his Lafcadio & Co.
bookshop into the large unused store room on the second floor of the
family business,the
store room where, as a child, he and his brothers would play among
the coils, flats, bales and heady scents of rough and soft fibres
imported from such exotic places as the Philippines, Russia, New
Zealand, Mauritius, Ireland, Yucatan, Bengal, Belgium and Holland,
with strange names like Manila Hemp, Sisal Hemp, Palma Istle, Flax
and Jute. They would play pirates and pretend they were aboard ship.
There was a climbing rope attached to the ceiling and they would
swing on that like dashing swashbucklers, swinging their swords,
wooden yard sticks with the business name printed on them. The pine
floors creaking, the yard sticks slapping, he could almost hear the
sounds. There had been two hammocks his father had fastened near the
front windows, and Duncan would often lie there, one leg dangling
over the cotton edge, reading an array of adventure books from his
Grandfather's collection at the back of the office below, Henty,
Marrayat, Ballantyne, Stevenson, Conan Doyle, intermixed with his own
gunslinger comic books and the complete Hardy Boys series. He had
been a keen reader of western comic books, and yet they were long
gone: The Cowboy Kid, Kid Colt, The Apache Kid, Two-Gun
Kid, and Rawhide Kid. The
brothers had shared them till they must have fallen apart. He had not
been one for collecting, only reading mattered at the time. He felt
that those old comic books had vanished much like the demand for what
he had to offer.

Duncan
stared at the lustrous fog and thought once more of the papers he had
found in his Father's files, an expansion project planned for the
early 1970s. A plan to become a manufacturer of rope products,
mountaineering and search and rescue ropes, circus and athletic
ropes, and specialized marine and aviation ropes. Losing his wife in
1970 had taken the wind out of his Father's sails. The projected
expansion had been filed away and never mentioned. Adrift, the
business had managed to stay afloat, but only just. The competition
overtook Strand Cordage with
the slightest of momentum.

He turned his back on the recalcitrant morning. Sometimes he thought he had ruined Amelia's life. If it hadn't been for a dumb
waiter in need of repair, they would never have met, and she might
have married an engineer or a lawyer, someone who could have easily
financed her desires, fulfilled her wishes.

If he could only
sell the family business and some of his book stock, he could
possibly raise enough to enable Amelia to take that post-graduate
course in England she had talked about so often. They could sell up
and move. Live in England for a year or so. He closed his eyes
thinking he should have sold them both back in 1991. The Internet had
been an exciting new prospect for bookselling, and those first ten
years were good, but the ebook revolution had dawned with bright
force. Becalmed in an era of digital tailwinds, his book business had
faltered. More Blade Runner than Bleak House.

2

He sat at his desk
and pushed the computer back. Out of a large deep drawer, he pulled
out an old ledger from 1881, the red leather spine drawing lines and
shedding small musty fragments on his pale green blotter. It was a somewhat unusual ledger for it had finely marbled endpapers. He had been
going through the company's files, interested in the day to day
operations. His forebears had been a source for many retailers of the
day, the grocers, the dry goods stores, mattress manufacturers, shoe
companies, ship builders, fish mongers, spice factors, coffee
roasters, stationers, plumbers, printers, newspapers, laundries,
florists, flour mills, butchers, glove makers, furniture
manufacturers, fruit merchants, awning, tent and carpet
manufacturers, and many, many others. Rope, twine, and string were
products of necessity.

The last retailer
whom Duncan could remember wrapping a package with string was Stuart
Grange. An old world ritual. Stuart would first wrap the books in
brown Kraft paper and then tie them up, neat packages that felt
special when you walked out onto the street with them under your arm.
It was as if you had been browsing in a bookshop in the 1880s and
emerged to find a bright loud world a century older where plastic
bags were ubiquitous. Grange Stuart Books had been a veritable
time machine. He missed Stuart and his old shop. When he and Amelia
would eat at the Commensale restaurant, he would often look out the
window and re-imagine the buildings that had been demolished,
buildings that housed an F. W. Woolworth store and Stuart Grange's
bookshop among many others. Or had it been a Kresge's store? The
buildings had been taken down long ago in order to expand the street
and construct a new shopping complex and business tower. Duncan
remembered the day he came across Stuart Grange sitting on a street
bench facing the new complex and they had sat there reminiscing about
the old shop, the old buildings, Stuart pointing with his cane
towards the spot where his shop used to be on the upper floors,
pointing to open air. They had both agreed that though physically the
buildings had vanished like a morning fog, there was still a remnant
manifestation that drew them to the spot like a vortex exerting its
pull. A black hole of the past. They had sat there seeing themselves
moving about in the past, walking on air, phantom walls and books
surrounding them. Stuart wrapping a package of books with twine while modern day Montrealers walked beneath his imagined self oblivious to
their past.

Duncan also missed
his one-eyed cat. An abstraction of ashes in an urn remained. A
picture of his cat, he realized now, would have been a better memento
mori. The weighty urn had become exceedingly non-representative. It was placed on the shelf to his right where books on the Far East were
shelved. Lafcadio was presently propping up The Story of the
Geisha Girl by T. Fujimoto, and Japan by Walter Dickson
both rather frayed and faded with age, behind which lay many works of
fiction, Kawabata, Tanizaki, Mishima, Dazai, and more modern
practitioners like Murakami. Lafcadio used to enjoy snoozing on the
shelves.

Duncan came to the
end of the ledger for 1881 and yet there was a facing page with an ink stain
in the shape of Sri Lanka, the Serendip of old, like a dark tear
drop of an ink God. The paper seemed to be older and of a completely
different type. He lifted the volume and looked through the page and
could see an edge of an old watermark. Turning the page over he came
to a blank page, and he continued to turn a few more pages until he
found a half page of printed text, upside down. He fanned the pages
and realized the last section of the ledger was made up of old paper
signatures bound-in upside down. Turning the book over he opened it
from the wrong end and came to a half-title page with a finely
written inscription in purple ink.

Chumley's Rest

On Books

Henry James Quotes

The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy. Consistency was in itself distinction, and what was talent but the art of being completely whatever it was that one happened to be? One's things were characteristic or were nothing.

-The Next Time (Story originally published in The Yellow Book; issued in his collection Embarrassments, 1896.)

"We know too much about people in these days; we hear too much. Our ears, our minds, our mouths, are stuffed with personalities. Don't mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself." (R. Touchett)